Florida Species and Habitat Monitoring Programs Catalog (Terra-CAT)

The Florida Species and Habitat Monitoring Programs Catalog (aka Terra-CAT) is a user-friendly and publicly accessible website that catalogs habitat- and species-related monitoring efforts within Florida. Terra-CAT supports the increasingly important need to document effective and efficient habitat monitoring efforts. The purpose of the online catalog is to ensure that all monitoring agencies know about monitoring activities in Florida, including: who (organization or individual carrying out monitoring); what (medium and habitat type being monitored); where (geographic location of monitoring activities); and when (the period of record for sampling efforts, frequency of sampling, etc.) of all monitoring efforts. This ongoing project supports the maintenance of the catalog and the website to ensure that it remains up-to-date and accessible to all users.

With the backing of the State Wildlife Grants program, FWRI’s Freshwater Plant researchers are working with personnel from the University of South Florida (USF) to assist catalog population by finding and uploading freshwater species and habitat monitoring efforts in Florida. Information gathered can help conservation agencies and managers identify monitoring gaps, evaluate the effectiveness of conservation actions, and track species of greatest conservation need. The researchers’ objective is to assist USF in identifying partners and acquiring freshwater species and habitat monitoring metadata from these sources, which will contribute to the freshwater portion of the Terra-CAT, available at http://www.Terra-CAT.org/.

Range of current monitoring projects uploaded to Terra-CAT.